Uniting Church Says No to Uranium Mining!
The Uniting Church has voiced strong concerns about the new Liberal Government’s decision to
lift the ban on Uranium mining within WA.
The Moderator of the Uniting Church, Rev Ken Williams, said the lifting of the ban was a bad
move for sustainability in WA.
“As a Church that has advocated for the sustainable use of the earth’s resources for the sake of
future generations, we are concerned that this move places our children’s future at risk.
“We believe the government should be focussing on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and
working to increase our use of non-nuclear renewable energy sources,” said Rev Williams.
“As a church that has embraced scientific discovery, the Uniting Church remains unconvinced
about the use of nuclear power as a solution to global warming.
“As a matter of urgency, we call on the government to work to reduce our dependence on fossil
fuels, rather than encouraging the use of more of the earth’s resources to produce unsustainable
levels of power.
“While we understand the desire to increase employment and derive economic gain from
uranium mining, this must be offset against the long-term economic, social and environmental
costs which will need to be paid by our children and grand-children for generations.
Tags: Environment
December 27th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Sadly, once again a UCA leader speaks out on a subject when he seems to have little or no understanding of the real world of production - the sole generator of the material wealth of the nation that alone is the basis that allows our society to develop and flourish in other ways.
While Australia does not need nuclear energy for power generation other countries for good reasons of their own have made different decisions. By what moral right does the UCA believe it should stand in the way of making uranium available to such countries?
Any competent engineer will tell you that there is no economic alternative power source to those currently in use to generate large scale around the clock electrical energy, which is fundamental to a modern industrial society. When there is, which may well not be in our life time, rest assured the power generation industry will be happy to adopt it. For green environmentalists to wave their arms and chant wind and solar power just proclaims their manifest ignorance or hypocrisy.
The world has two choices if it believes in man made global warming. Either reach global agreement on restraining carbon dioxide emissions or deal with the results of global warming if they occur. The former will never happen in a world which can not even reach agreement in world trade talks that have been going on for a decade or longer. The latter is a far more sensible option and man is an extremely adaptable creature. However such a sensible approach has little appeal to those who love to feature in the climate alarm headlines.